Exceptions to Reality_ Stories - Alan Dean Foster [15]
Bastrop nodded thoughtfully. Even his enfeebled voice, when he replied, was one that could still command fleets and minions. “We’ve come to find the Chauna. We will search until we do so.”
Tyrone’s lips tightened. His response was devoid of insolence, but firm. “At the risk of voicing a cliché, sir, money can’t buy everything. It can’t buy you people.”
“No, but it can damn well rent them for me,” Bastrop declared with knowing confidence.
“It can’t buy you a myth.”
“That remains to be seen. You are dismissed, Mr. Tyrone.”
The Shipmaster nodded imperceptibly and bowed out. Wakoma and Surat were waiting for him on the bridge.
“What did he say?” Surat was small and dynamic, like a puppy perpetually kept on a too-short leash. She was also the finest navigator Tyrone had ever worked with. “Did you make your point?” Her expression was no less eager than Wakoma’s.
“I made it.” The Shipmaster brushed past them. “And he ignored it. Stand by for downslip.” He settled into place in front of his bank of readouts.
Crestfallen but hardly surprised, the two seconds in command parted, each to their own station. Tyrone’s words meant that more weeks, maybe months, of pointless wandering lay before them. Like the rest of the crew, they were beyond homesick. If this kept up, the home portion of their condition would begin to slough away for real.
“Maybe he’ll die.” Wakoma struggled to concentrate on his work. Like everyone else on board the Seraphim, he was an exceedingly competent professional.
“Not likely.” The tech seated alongside him kept his voice down. “There’s enough advanced medical technology on this ship to allow an amoeba to operate a torkue projector. With the medics caressing his carcass twenty-four seven, I’ll bet the old bastard’s got another twenty years in him before he slides into complete senility.”
The ship plunged out of OTL to emerge in the vicinity of Delta Avinis. It was the forty-third multiple-star system the Seraphim had visited since leaving home. According to the elaborate Cosocagglia mythology, the Chauna was only to be encountered in multiple-star systems. Why this should be, no one knew—not even the Cosocagglia themselves. It did not matter, Tyrone grumbled silently as coordinates were checked and confirmed, because there was no such thing as a Chauna. They might as well be searching single-star systems, or dark wanderers, or the ghostly gray silverstone spheres known as stuttering molters.
“Something beautiful.” That was how the Cosocagglia legends identified the Chauna. A stellar phenomenon that was supposedly unsurpassingly beautiful. That was about all the fable had to say about it, too. Tyrone had seen the translations, laboriously performed by the xenologists who worked with nonhuman species, like the Cosocagglia. Where the Chauna was concerned the Cosocagglia could supply reams of adjectives but nothing in the way of specifics. A Chauna was no more, no less, than a beautiful thing.
They had encountered the phenomenon but rarely; a millennia ago, when the Cosocagglia had been in their prime: a youthful, expansionist, vital race. To see a Chauna, it was said, was to be blessed forever with knowledge of what real beauty was. Any individuals so consecrated by the vision were held up to be the most fortunate of travelers. But for all its supposed wonder, there remained in the crumbled lore of the species not a single description of the Chauna itself.
How exceptional could it be, anyway? Tyrone mused. Even if it existed, it was hardly likely to be a previously unobserved phenomenon. In the course of the past thousand years humankind had identified an enormous range of stellar objects and events, from X-ray bursters to miniature ambling pulsars to Möbius black holes. Some were so esoteric, the always busy astrophysicists had not found time to name them. Some were even beautiful, like the tornadic nebulae and the gamma-ray ropes. But none, according to the Cosocagglia